Wednesday, December 31, 2008

wrap up

There should be a checklist somewhere...
  • Health? Good. Not a single MC taken since I first started working 3 years ago.
  • Money? Good. Company pays a nice hefty bonus for a good performance.
  • Career? Good. New position for the new year.
Don't really know what else to ask for beside that, really. Contrary to popular believe I am a happy person, easily content at what life brings.

Then there should be another checklist for next year. Checklist, not resolutions mind you, because resolutions are pointless.

Sit for and pass Level 1 CFA. Preferably in July. Otherwise December also can. Not because I need it, but just because I want to say I can do it. If you are a Finance person and would like to tell me that I am a lunatic for wanting to do it for the fuck of it, well save your breath. No less than 3 of my close friends have told me that only crazy people do a CFA 'for the fuck of it'. So yes, I have been told that I am mad. Nothing new there.

Then I wanna climb Kinabalu. Then climb Tahan.

Yeah, very disjointed. Not like me at all. But you see, I have been spending the last 2 weeks on leave and reading 3 books, all of them about different things, and I keep hopping from book to book, and all of a different genre. First, there's King of the Godfathers which is a true story of er, The King of the Godfathers. Then there's Asian Godfathers which I think every working adult should read. And lastly Nelson Mandela's autobiography which came highly recommended by Penthesilea. All very deep stuff. Plus, I have been reading Stiglitz's Globalisation and Its Discontents for the past 5 months or so but my puny brain can't seem to absorb all the facts, so I keep re-reading the earlier chapters.

But enough talk la. I will leave you with my annual mantra, which I think you guys have read before:
I am not going to wish you an awesome year ahead, because everybody knows that's not going to happen. Inevitabliy, there will be setbacks, disappointments and heartbreaks. I do, however wish you the strength to overcome all that shit, the tenacity to piss in the wind and the guts to stare down the barrel of a gun.

And above all, to enjoy the new year.


Tuesday, December 09, 2008

this is cap

This is ubbish. My keyboad is oicially ucked.

See i you can igue out which keys ae spoilt? I'll would gie you a hint but I don't think you ae that etaded. Actually this is un. Enjoyable, in act. Because chatting with people on MSN, I am oced to think o synonyms so that my sentences make sense.

As an example, I can't say ca, so I say automobile. I can't say ATAU, so I say altenatiely. Well, it's still nonsense, but at least "altenatiely" makes moe sense than "o". Then, I came acoss the most itating (annoying) wod that is 3 lettes long, stats with APH, ends with _ome (1st lette - Julius Cease's place) and sounds like the English wod 2+2 EMPAT.

You see what I did thee?


I thought I could use the numbe to subsitute the wod, just like 15 yea old blogges do, but een that numbe is ucked!!!

Oh, so yeah, I shouldn't say UCK eithe cause its sounds so stupid, so I hae to epogam my habit o calling people *ucke*s and call them assholes instead. Altenatiely cheebais, because that woks too.

Let's see...

This Chistmas, I need a new laptop, plus some money to shit house. No wait, that didn't sound betul. I need money to moe house. Dammit, cannot also. I NEED MONEY TO PINDAH TEMPAT KEDUDUKAN SAYA. Hmph! 1st sentence that made sense! I would tell you the stoy on why I need to moe but that's gonna be a long stoy and I think you wouldn't want to baca the stoy this way.

UCK it.

SCEW it.

I am going to sleep.

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Wednesday, December 03, 2008

mukhriz & thailand

When someone commented a few weeks ago that he couldn't understand why the Malay politicians go bonkers when the 'Malay special rights' are questioned. His logic was, why get so worked up over it when people were merely putting their views forward and not asking it to be totally removed. There should be room for discussion, shouldn't there? Silly government, he said.

I told him I agreed wholeheartedly. Discussion is good, but I added, if you wanted a similar outcry of ridiculous proportions, you only need to say something about the existence of vernacular schools and you will hear the Chinese politicians going bonkers as well.

For one, I've mentioned my take on this before. I do not like the idea of segragating kids as old as 5 (I am sure you've heard of Chinese kindergartens as well) by the language they speak, which most of the time relateds to the colour of their skin. And this goes for all types of segregation - vernacular schools, yes, but also religious schools and institutions of higher learning as well.

I read a rather good article in today's NST, talking about Thailand and how we should be counting our blessings. I am not going to dwell into how they seem to be in shambles while we are arguing about yoga, neither am I going to say how much better off we are.

However, I would like to highlight a couple of points:

Our neighbours' situations are infinitely fascinating to us because of what they are that we are not, or not yet anyway. They have a strong, united and irrepressible civil society movement centred in Bangkok, which involves professionals, students, the media and the middle class. They revere their monarchy to the point of taking lese majeste charges very seriously. They also think representative democracy is pretty much a joke.

Thai academician Ji Giles Ungkaporn, who wrote in 2003 about the Thai non-governmental organisations scene and the problems of democratic representation in its peoples' movements, was blistering in his latest assessment of the situation in Bangkok. Back then he talked about social movements like the Assembly of the Poor, which consisted mostly of the Thai peasantry and rural poor. The assembly sat protesting in front of government buildings for their rights, but as Ungkaporn noted, it was actually educated activists who conducted the negotiations. Leadership was very much elitist, and ultimately the poor could only speak through their votes.

Ungkaporn on Wednesday wrote that it was now "fascist thugs" from the anti-government People's Alliance for Democracy who are demanding that their government, democratically elected by the majority of the Thai population, hands over power. "The PAD wants a dictatorship to replace democracy because they deem that the majority of the Thai electorate are too ignorant to deserve the right to vote."

Thankfully, we are not quite like surgeon Noppakoon Lagum, one of those occupying Suvarnabhumi International airport, who claimed: "Rural people have good hearts but they don't know the truth like we do in Bangkok. It is our duty to re-educate them." This is a scary pomposity.

Does this sound familiar?

You bet it does, because that is exactly the mentality a lot of Malaysians share - a lot of URBAN Malaysians, I must add.

When I questioned last year's BERSIH rally, many urbanites pounced on me for my critisism of nothing more than a political march. They said that me being inconvenienced was a small price to pay for 'the cause'. What cause, I asked? Their cause, not mine! Many concluded that I was ignorant and unwilling to pay the price for democracy (or some mumbo jumbo along those lines). I suppose this would be the same people who, if push comes to shove, would be willing to shut down our national airport to get what they want.

These are the same people who supported Anwar Ibrahim's September 16 (failed) project, even though the BN government won the mandate to rule, just 6 months before that. The reason these urbanites gave was because the BN government won the rural votes - and you can't let these simple minded kampung folk make important decisions! Yes, let's allow the urbanites to decide everything for the greater good and complain about fuel price along the way. Who are these kampung folk to decide who should rule? It's for their own good!

Democracy? If you thought March 8, was a sign that democracy was alive and kicking in Malaysia, you have gotta be smoking weed.

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